Agenda Giveaways

     Sad to say, these days there aren’t many questions that don’t have a political component. Politics has crept into places where it never was before and – in the great majority of cases – doesn’t belong. I’ve written about the reasons for this in the past, so I shan’t bore you this morning by repeating myself.

     Among the most egregious cases of politics where it doesn’t belong are those that pertain to science and / or technology. Some of the political players manage to disguise their agendas better than others, which is why I’m writing on this subject. It’s vital that Americans who want to see clearly be equipped to detect a political agenda in an issue that “should” rest on purely rational considerations.

     One I have in mind this morning, courtesy of Glenn Reynolds, is the nature of electrical power generation and distribution. The U.S. has three distinct power distribution regions, or “grids.” One services East of the Rockies; one services West of the Rockies; and one services the state of Texas. There are people who see this as a problem. Why? What advantages would accrue to American electrical power consumers were the three grids to be integrated?

     This article in IEEE Spectrum discusses the subject – in a politicized way. It’s fairly long, but if you have the stamina I suggest that you read it for yourself rather than take my word for its orientation.

     The article is in the form of an interview, but it doesn’t take long to detect that putative interviewer Steven Cherry is entirely in agreement with interviewee Peter Fairley that the grids “should” be integrated. It doesn’t take much longer to detect Fairley’s agenda. All one must do is note the occurrences of words and phrases about highly politicized pseudo-issues:

• Wind farms
• Climate change
• Renewable energy
• “move off of our largely carbon-based sources of power”
• “accelerate the shutdown of coal-fired power”
• “U.S. administration’s connections to—devotion to—the coal industry.”
• “the oil and gas industry is definitely also a major political backer of the Trump administration.”
• “states have their own public utility commission that has to approve new power lines.”
• “making renewable energy look less competitive.”
• “the Trump administration...violates DOE’s own scientific integrity policies”
• “recognize the huge challenge that climate change poses and to change the way we live and to change our energy system”

     At several points Fairley asserts that “the financial and reliability benefits are substantial” and that the integration of the three grids would “pay for itself.” Yet he adduces no evidence to that effect. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado did a study that says so; that’s enough for him.

     Notice also that there are questions that interviewer Cherry never bothers to ask:

What’s the downside to integration?
What would it cost?
What disruptions would it involve?
How long would they last?
What new vulnerabilities would it create?
Who would be affected and to what degree?

     The failure to ask those questions is the deadest of dead giveaways. Cherry is no more a disinterested interviewer than Fairley – a journalist, not a scientist nor engineer – is a disinterested student of the subject.

     The subject is interesting and complex from a technological standpoint, but even more so from a political perspective. A single, nationwide grid would naturally come under the control of some federal agency. How would that control be used? What constraints and what oversight would apply? Would power producers have equal, unbiased access to the grid, or would there be wheeling and dealing to exclude disfavored competitors? Would the state governments have any role? Who would be held liable for anything that might go wrong?

     This has been an agenda-detection study in the public interest – the real public interest, in which the public is presumed interested in what might be done to it, under what rationales, and who would make out like bandits as a consequence.

     Beware him who offers you something for nothing, something that’s all upside and no downside, something “too good to be true.” For that, too, is a giveaway.

Concerning My Smartphone Agonies

     Subsequent to posting yesterday’s rant, I received a lot of email that echoed the sentiments therein. One piece in particular was rather plaintive. The writer wanted to know why no one writes clear instructions in readable English any longer. It cast my thoughts back to a book many Gentle Readers have read and others have heard about and have said “Yeah, I’ve always meant to read that.” Here’s a long but relevant citation:

     DeWeese brings over some instructions for assembly of an outdoor barbecue rotisserie which he wants me to evaluate as a professional technical writer. He’s spent a whole afternoon trying to get the thing together and he wants to see these instructions totally damned.

     But as I read them they look like ordinary instructions to me and I'm at a loss to find anything wrong with them. I don't want to say this, of course, so I hunt hard for something to pick on. You can’t really tell whether a set of instructions is all right until you check it against the device or procedure it describes, but I see a page separation that prevents reading without flipping back and forth between the text and illustration., .always a poor practice. I jump on this very hard and DeWeese encourages every jump. Chris takes the instructions to see what I mean.

     But while I'm jumping on this and describing some of the agonies of misinterpretation that bad cross- referencing can produce, I've a feeling that this isn't why DeWeese found them so hard to understand. It's just the lack of smoothness and continuity which threw him off. He’s unable to comprehend things when they appear in the ugly, chopped-up, grotesque sentence style common to engineering and technical writing. Science works with chunks and bits and pieces of things with the continuity presumed, and DeWeese works only with the continuities of things with the chunks and bits and pieces presumed. What he really wants me to damn is the lack of artistic continuity, something an engineer couldn’t care less about. It hangs up, really, on the classic-romantic split, like everything else about technology.

     But Chris, meanwhile, takes the instructions and folds them around in a way I hadn't thought of so that the illustration sits there right next to the text. I double-take this, then triple-take it and feel like a movie cartoon character who has just walked beyond the edge of a cliff but hasn't fallen yet because he hasn’t realized his predicament. I nod, and there’s silence, and then I realize my predicament, then a long laughter as I pound Chris on the top of the head all the way down to the bottom of the canyon. When the laughter subsides, I say, "Well, anyway — " but the laughter starts all over again.

     "What I wanted to say," I finally get in, "is that I've a set of instructions at home which open up great realms for the improvement of technical writing. They begin, 'Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind.’ "

     This produces more laughter, but Sylvia and Gennie and the sculptor give sharp looks of recognition.

     "That’s a good instruction," the sculptor says. Gennie nods too.

     "That’s kind of why I saved it," I say. "At first I laughed because of memories of bicycles I'd put together and, of course, the unintended slur on Japanese manufacture. But there's a lot of wisdom in that statement."

     John looks at me apprehensively. I look at him with equal apprehension. We both laugh. He says, "The professor will now expound."

     "Peace of mind isn't at all superficial, really," I expound. "It’s the whole thing. That which produces it is good maintenance; that which disturbs it is poor maintenance. What we call workability of the machine is just an objectification of this peace of mind. The ultimate test’s always your own serenity. If you don't have this when you start and maintain it while you're working you're likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself."

     They just look at me, thinking about this.

     "It's an unconventional concept," I say, "but conventional reason bears it out. The material object of observation, the bicycle or rotisserie, can’t be right or wrong. Molecules are molecules. They don't have any ethical codes to follow except those people give them. The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test. If the machine produces tranquillity it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed. The test of the machine’s always your own mind. There isn't any other test."

     DeWeese asks, "What if the machine is wrong and I feel peaceful about it?"

     Laughter.

     I reply, "That's self-contradictory. If you really don't care you aren't going to know it’s wrong. The thought’ll never occur to you. The act of pronouncing it wrong's a form of caring."

     I add, "What’s more common is that you feel unpeaceful even if it’s right, and I think that’s the actual case here. In this case, if you're worried, it isn't right. That means it isn’t checked out thoroughly enough. In any industrial situation a machine that isn't checked out is a ‘down’ machine and can't be used even though it may work perfectly. Your worry about the rotisserie is the same thing. You haven’t completed the ultimate requirement of achieving peace of mind, because you feel these instructions were too complicated and you may not have understood them correctly."

     DeWeese asks, "Well, how would you change them so I would get this peace of mind?"

     "That would require a lot more study than I’ve just given them now. The whole thing goes very deep. These rotisserie instructions begin and end exclusively with the machine. But the kind of approach I’m thinking about doesn’t cut it off so narrowly. What’s really angering about instructions of this sort is that they imply there’s only one way to put this rotisserie together...their way. And that presumption wipes out all the creativity. Actually there are hundreds of ways to put the rotisserie together and when they make you follow just one way without showing you the overall problem the instructions become hard to follow in such a way as not to make mistakes. You lose feeling for the work. And not only that, it’s very unlikely that they’ve told you the best way."

     "But they’re from the factory," John says.

     "I’m from the factory too," I say "and I know how instructions like this are put together. You go out on the assembly line with a tape recorder and the foreman sends you to talk to the guy he needs least, the biggest goof-off he’s got, and whatever he tells you...that’s the instructions. The next guy might have told you something completely different and probably better, but he’s too busy." They all look surprised. "I might have known," DeWeese says.

     "It's the format," I say. "No writer can buck it. Technology presumes there’s just one right way to do things and there never is. And when you presume there's just one right way to do things, of course the instructions begin and end exclusively with the rotisserie. But if you have to choose among an infinite number of ways to put it together then the relation of the machine to you, and the relation of the machine and you to the rest of the world, has to be considered, because the selection from many choices, the art of the work is just as dependent upon your own mind and spirit as it is upon the material of the machine. That’s why you need the peace of mind."

     "Actually this idea isn’t so strange," I continue. "Sometime look at a novice workman or a bad workman and compare his expression with that of a craftsman whose work you know is excellent and you’ll see the difference. The craftsman isn’t ever following a single line of instruction. He’s making decisions as he goes along. For that reason he’ll be absorbed and attentive to what he’s doing even though he doesn’t deliberately contrive this. His motions and the machine are in a kind of harmony. He isn't following any set of written instructions because the nature of the material at hand determines his thoughts and motions, which simultaneously change the nature of the material at hand. The material and his thoughts are changing together in a progression of changes until his mind’s at rest at the same time the material’s right."

     "Sounds like art," the instructor says.

     "Well, it is art," I say. "This divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural. It’s just that it’s gone on so long you have to be an archeologist to find out where the two separated. Rotisserie assembly is actually a long-lost branch of sculpture, so divorced from its roots by centuries of intellectual wrong turns that just to associate the two sounds ludicrous."

     They're not sure whether I’m kidding or not.

     "You mean," DeWeese asks, "that when I was putting this rotisserie together I was actually sculpting it?"

     "Sure."

     He goes over this in his mind, smiling more and more. "I wish I'd known that," he says. Laughter follows.

     Chris says he doesn't understand what I'm saying. "That's all right, Chris,” lack Bareness says. "We don’t either." More laughter.

     "I think I’ll just stay with ordinary sculpture," the sculptor says.

     "I think I’ll just stick to painting," DeWeese says.

     "I think I’ll just stick to drumming," John says.

     Chris asks, "What are you going to stick to?"

     "Mah guns, boy, mah guns," I tell him. "That’s the Code of the West."

     They all laugh hard at this, and my speechifying seems forgiven. When you’ve got a Chautauqua in your head, it’s extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.

     If you recognize the book, congratulations on having a fine memory. If not, it’s Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values. It has a fair claim to being one of the most influential books of the Twentieth Century.

     Pirsig’s style is much like mine: He orbits his central point until he can arrow in on it with decisive force. In the above, the central point is the importance of an esthetic of elegance – an artist’s esthetic – to the writing of a technical document. And he nails it.

     The dismissive attitude so many tech vendors have toward the documentation of their wares is a symptom of an important sickness. That sickness doesn’t yet have a name. It tolerates ugliness and awkwardness where elegance and simplicity should reign. The emphasis is on saving a few pennies on the development budget when saving the eventual customer’s sanity and good will ought to be the highest priority. It’s a great part of the reason for experiences like the one I narrated yesterday.

     Elegance and simplicity are the twin progeny of a profound understanding: a comprehension of the wherefores of the device and its design, in whole and in part. If you don’t understand the design of the device and the principles behind it, you’ll never produce an elegant, simple set of assembly instructions. If you don’t understand the reasons the customer would purchase the device, you’ll never write an elegant, simple User’s Guide: i.e., a document good for something other than a doorstop.

     Food for thought for your Monday.

Hostile Technology: A Vent

     I am a retired engineer: a technologist by trade. Thus, I expect to find the technology I confront comprehensible. Sadly, that isn’t always the case. These days, now that there’s software in everything, the software artisan in me is often close to apoplexy.

     Many have been the times when a badly designed website has made me want to ferret out the designer and throttle him to within an inch of his life. This impulse becomes especially strong when the website in question is one that offers something for sale that I’d like to purchase. Worse still is when the website is operated by some vendor with whom I must do business – e.g., a local utility company – and I can get assistance from that vendor in no other way. Such companies have little idea what they’re doing to themselves with their websites’ poor human engineering.

     But today’s adventure isn’t about a website. Oh no. It’s about something even more diabolical. Yet it’s a device you probably already have, and have learned to cope with.

     Yes, that’s right, Gentle Reader: The Last American Without A Smartphone has just acquired a smartphone. I didn’t want one. The proliferation of Internet two-factor security systems that require one has forced my hand.

     “They’re really simple and convenient,” said my beloved wife Beth, whose uses her phone mostly for playing variations on Bejeweled. “It’s like having the world in your hand. You’ll fall in love with it.” I forbore to comment.

     The lovely young lady who assisted me in this purchase advised me not to get a bottom-tier model. (She assured me she wouldn’t get a commission on the sale.) She steered me up the pyramid to what she called a middle-of-the-road device. I walked out of the store $560 poorer, with a device I had no idea how to use even to make or take a phone call. I sit here today fulminating over this purchase, and I shall tell you why.

     First, the phone doesn’t come with a User’s Guide. Oh no. That’s so last year. It comes with a “Quick Reference Guide”...which doesn’t tell you how to turn the thing on, much less how to make or accept a call. So I went to the vendor’s website to search for a downloadable User’s Guide. Believe it or not, Gentle Reader, I had to compel the website’s Help system to connect me to a human assistant to find the damned thing and download it...and it still didn’t tell me how to turn the phone on.

     I figured it out by experimentation, after nearly twenty minutes’ frustration. But that was just the start of my agonies. Now I had to figure out how to make a call.

     The phone’s home screen tells you nothing. It’s covered with icons, but there’s no help available for what they do. Hie thee to the User’s Guide, Fran! Which I did. But would you like to guess how far into that document I had to read to find out how to make a call? I was fifty pages deep into the thing before I threw up my hands. Then I asked Beth, who has a similar model. The procedure is relatively simple, though I wouldn’t call it intuitive. But there’s worse.

     The key to making the mastery of a new device pleasant is consistency of approach. Fundamental operations should be uniform. That makes them easy to master: the application of a common vocabulary of basic actions to a range of operations. How was I to know that phone calls are no longer considered fundamental operations on a phone?

     You’d think that a touch-screen device festooned with tap-and-go icons would use a tap-and-go approach to invoke the operations they govern. And that is indeed the case...with one exception that’s impossible to intuit. The exception: Accepting an incoming call.

     The ring tone sounds, the screen illuminates, and the number of the caller is prominently displayed. Below it are two icons: a green handset and a red handset. Green means “go,” right? So I tapped the green handset...and the ring tone continued uninterrupted. I tapped it again. I tapped it twice in rapid succession. I tried holding it down. No dice: the call went to voice mail.

     I couldn’t decline the call by tapping the Red handset, as I discovered soon afterward. The call still went to voice mail.

     The Quick Reference Guide was no help. Apparently, as with turning the device on, the knowledge of how to accept an incoming call must be transmitted genetically from father to son.

     Where’s that damned User’s Guide again? Read, read, scratch head, read further...did I buy a camera by mistake? Or perhaps a handheld PlayStation? Ah, here we go: Answering a call. I only had to read 77 pages to find it. So what’s the secret handshake?

     What? I have to swipe the green handset icon to the right? Swipe? Everything else this damnable device can do is accessed by tap-icon-and-go, but this, the most important thing anyone has ever done with a phone, has to be different?!

     This is evil. This is a mortal sin against good design principles. This is worthy of a life sentence programming a PDP-8 with nothing but an ASR-33 teletype.

     I hate this thing. I want to return it. But I can’t. I need it now. The world around me has decreed that Thou Shalt Have A Smartphone. I’d settle for slowly torturing the designer to death, but I suppose the satisfaction from that would be fleeting.

     I’m told the top-tier units are even less oriented toward making and taking phone calls. I suppose I should take comfort from that.

     Excuse me? You want to know the make and model? It’s a Samsung Galaxy A50. With this execrable device Samsung has guaranteed that I will never again buy any of its products. But this one, I’m stuck with. And please, don’t regale me with the improved ease of use and incredible new features the coming models will offer. I’d rather use a Dixie Cup on a thread...if it could send and receive text messages, anyway.

What Does Not Change: A Slightly Early Rumination

     Before I get started on the meat of this piece: My sincerest thanks to those Gentle Readers who wrote me with helpful suggestions for dealing with the problem I mentioned here. For the present I’ve decided to use Microsoft’s OneNote, which is included in Office and offers many conveniences I didn’t know about until I started fooling with it. We shall see whether it meets my needs.

     Having said that...

---

     Sarah Hoyt has an essay up about the rate and ever broadening sweep of technological change in our time, especially as regards the pervasion of our ways by the Internet, and the visible implications for our patterns of life. It’s a good piece, but it focuses, as we who live under the veil of Time are prone to doing, on practicalities: what the rate and breadth of tech change will mean for our livelihoods and related life patterns.

     There’s a lot to think about here. For some time my concerns have focused on social atomization: the ever widening separation between each individual and all those who once would have mattered to him intimately. We can already see aspects of this in the “device addiction” plague that’s taken hold of American society. Go to any restaurant – yes, there are still places outside the home where one can sit and eat food prepared by others – and survey the faces of other diners. Quite a percentage of them will be bathed in the glow from a backlit screen, regardless of who else might be sitting at the table.

     Yes, it’s a bad thing. But I’m not going to harp on it today. I’ve done that before. Besides, I prefer to flog live horses.

     What I have in mind this morning is the divergence between the realm of “can and can’t” and that of “may and mustn’t.” Quite a lot of good people believe, although perhaps unconsciously and inarticulately, that the former can alter the rules that govern the latter. This, to be maximally gentle about it, is not the case. And it has dawned upon me that that argument is in dire need of refreshment.

---

     One of the reasons I write fiction, most recently near-future science fiction, is that the genre allows me to explore challenges to our assumptions about right and wrong. Most of our “thinking” about moral choices is nothing of the sort. We make such choices from deeply inculcated premises about moral and ethical behavior, not from a rational analysis of implied consequences. Mostly, that’s for the best; most people lack the intellectual horsepower to work out the “may and mustn’t” aspects of a situation on the spot. But sometimes, thinking about consequences is absolutely vital.

     As an example of what I have in mind, have a snippet from one of my recent novels:

     “Forget it, Jules,” Celia said. “This is as close to can’t-happen as genetics gets. The sequencer assays were correct. Unless the gods of random chance are playing with our heads, Miss Mecking’s been cloned. But how?”
     “Either one of Anna’s cell nuclei and a bunch of her mitochondria were transplanted into a viable zygote,” Amanda said, “or a cell taken from her was somehow goosed into mitosis.”
     “Doesn’t matter,” Sokoloff said.
     “It doesn’t?” Trish said.
     “Nope,” he said. “Because the bastards who did it aren’t going to tell us.”
     Trish smirked. “Going to give them a chance, Lar?”
     He leveled a flat look at her. “Ask me again when we’ve got them in our sights.”
     Trish smiled tightly and nodded.
     He’s really going to go after them.
     This is for the big chips.
     She fished up her own resolve and scrutinized it.
     I’m going with him. No matter what he has to say about it.
     “It would be the technological miracle of the century, you know,” Amanda said.
     The flat look swerved to settle on Amanda Hallstrom.
     “To be used for what?” Sokoloff said.
     The dean of Athene Academy opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. Sokoloff’s gaze weighed upon her.
     That’s his don’t-mess-with-me face.
     Sokoloff nodded.
     “I’ve been turning it over in my head,” he murmured after a moment, “and I can’t think of one morally acceptable reason to clone someone. Living or dead doesn’t matter.” He swept his gaze around the group. “Can anyone else?”
     No one spoke.
     “The people who did this,” he said, “did it to turn out a sex slave. Probably by request and to specification, and I’d bet my house that if they haven’t done it before, they’re trying to do it again right now. For that I’m going to send them all to hell. But think about it. Let’s say they were to clone me—produce a baby version of me. That baby would have no parents or other relatives. The people who produced him would have no reason to care for him, or about him, and only they would know he existed. He would be a product for sale. Why would anyone make that product? Why would anyone want that product? Apart from pure altruism?”
     “Altruism?” Trish said.
     “Yeah,” he said. “The kind that makes people take in stray dogs and cats. Think that’s likely?”
     Well, you did it.
     “The only reason to clone someone, other than the motives Fountain’s creators had, would be to replace him,” he said. “Or parts of him. And that means either murder, or enslavement, or cannibalism by surgeon. It’s evil no matter how you slice it.”
     “That’s if clones were granted the status and rights of people born the...regular way,” Juliette said. “What if they weren’t?”
     Sokoloff gestured at Fountain. Six pairs of eyes swung toward her. She remained still and silent.
     “That’s worse, isn’t it?” he said.
     Trish slid over next to Fountain and took her hand.
     “A lot worse,” she said.
     “Yeah,” Juliette said.
     “So what now?” Amanda said.
     Sokoloff remained as solemn as a man at prayer. Trish fought not to shudder.
     “Now,” he said, “I follow their backtrail, find their lab, and burn it to the ground.”
     “Lar?” Trish said. He looked questioningly at her. “With them in it, right?”
     He seemed to consider the idea for a moment, then grinned faintly. “Well, yeah.”

     Larry Sokoloff, one of the two protagonists of Innocents, is my conception of a “workingman’s hero.” He works for a private security firm. You could say, in some sense, that his trade is “protective violence,” whether express or implied. Yet he’s no thug. He has a profound sense for right and wrong, as demonstrated above – emphasis on the word profound.

     That sense is endangered by too much attention to the technological runaway in which Americans are currently ensnared.

---

     One review of Innocents included the following, seemingly unexceptionable line:

     [I]n the face of truly new situations, new morality must emerge.

     The statement piqued me. It seemed vaguely off-center. I didn’t take issue with it – I never take issue with the writer of a complimentary review, for reasons I trust I need not elaborate on – but it’s stayed with me, germinating ideas, ever since I first encountered it. This morning, those ideas have flowered. Yea verily, at 3:30 AM Eastern Standard Time.

     The technology of cloning, as postulated in Innocents, was an example of an enlargement of our “can and can’t” realm. That realm impinged on the lives of my protagonists, Larry Sokoloff and Trish McAvoy. It had a dramatic effect on them, with consequences you’ll have to read the novel and its sequels Experiences and The Wise and the Mad to explore. But it did not change the moral laws of the universe. Rather, it compelled Sokoloff to recur to the underlying ethical principle that governs all human interaction.

     Jesus of Nazareth once articulated that principle for the benefit of some less-than-benevolently-minded questioners:

     But when the Pharisees had heard that he had put the Sadducees to silence, they were gathered together. Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law?
     Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment.
     And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
     On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

     [Matthew 22:34-40]

     I’m not going to boldface it or italicize it for you. Find it for yourself.

---

     The underlying moral laws of the universe are constant. That’s because human nature itself is constant. The characteristics that differentiate us from the lesser species:

• Our nature and consciousness of ourselves as limited, time-bound creatures;
• Our individual desires;
• Our individual abilities and priorities;

     ...are integral to the understanding of those moral laws, because they give rise to the laws themselves. This is something that should be part of the moral education of every child...but isn’t. It wasn’t part of mine; I had to work it out for myself.

     John Brunner expressed that moral fundamental in his novel The Shockwave Rider: It is fundamentally wrong to regard another person as a thing to be used for one’s own purposes. Brunner’s protagonist Nicky Haflinger applied the word wicked to such an attitude. In this he was impeccably correct.

     In this lies the moral import of the Second Great Commandment: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” You have your abilities, desires, and priorities, and he has his. You may collaborate with him, trade with him, argue with him, or snort and tell him he’s an ignoramus, but you may not force him to subordinate his desires and priorities to yours. Neither may you deceive him into doing so.

     And not all the technological change we’ve experienced, nor whatever further changes lie before us, can alter that law.

---

     In closing, it would be a fatal mistake ever to imagine that the “cans and can’ts” of our time can alter the moral laws. It will always be wrong to treat another person as no more than a thing to be used for one’s own purposes. It will always be wrong to tolerate it when others do so. That is the underlying moral law on which Commandments Four through Ten of the Decalogue are founded.

     This is not “new” morality. Indeed, it’s the oldest morality of all: the one written into our natures by our Creator. No matter how our technology advances and ramifies, it will never, ever change.

     May God bless and keep you all.

Violations of the 1st Amendment

A President that spies on reporters, claiming national security.

CBS News has the same story.

So, why is the Trump administration's action in the news. In this case, the information given to a reporter really does seem to touch on national security.

Sharyl Atkinson, a well-respected reporter, weighs in on the actions of both administrations.

Shadowing-Banning Explained.

I started this post days ago. I was going to schedule it for early this week.

That schedule may be interrupted. I keep finding more of the Quasi-Corporate, but really Ideology-Controlled Censorship. With the tech-corporate, ed-establishment, and NGO-leadership intertwined in their actions, this is reaching beyond the Collusion level, and into the Conspiracy realm.

Yes, private companies can control the flow of information. However, social media has been given a pass on the content on their platforms, because they have been treated as a common carrier.

...natural monopolies and near-monopolies were deemed to be “common carriers” upon whom the law imposed a duty of providing access on a non-discriminatory basis. The (classically liberal) common law of that era recognized that such entities could exercise market power, or engage in discriminatory conduct without fear of competitive check. Thus, the obligation to serve all on a non-discriminatory basis in order to constrain the exercise of market power, or invidious discrimination based on the preferences of the owner of the common carrier.

It's that non-discriminatory basis that may get them booted from the classification. They've clearly engaged in discrimination by viewpoint. The government could legitimately step in.

However, as a practical move, the timing may depend on the election. If the government signals their hand before the election, expect a frantic response to elect Democrats, involving money, even more censorship, and near-hysteria.

Waiting might be the more prudent move. Surprisingly, Trump might just pull that off - he is a shoot-from-the-hip kind of guy, but has been known to move cautiously, given a good reason.

Last - just before this post was scheduled to go live, I found this article about Deep Fakes - videos that have been created, that appear to be the real thing. For a chilling example of what that might mean to you and I, there is this fictional story.

Cities And The Evolution Of Nations

     If you haven’t read Jane Jacobs’s visionary book Cities And The Wealth Of Nations, you should grab a copy before they’re all gone. Miss Jacobs, in her time one of the most astute of all analysts of social organization and development, laid out a brilliant case for the city as the critical element in human economic progress. When it was published in 1984, there was nothing else like it, certainly nothing in macroeconomic analysis that shared its daring premise.

     But as with books on any other sociological or economic topic, a book on macroeconomics will be conceived and written within a conceptual framework whose bounds are set by existing conditions, especially existing political and technological conditions. Miss Jacobs’s vision did not allow for several important changes in our informational and technological milieu that followed her treatise. Indeed, it could be argued that those changes were driven in part by the centrality of cities in the structure of production of the post-World War II decades.

     Consider: the world’s major cities are almost all on high-traffic waterways. The world’s major cities almost all possess extensive rail links and are near major airports. The world’s major cities almost all emphasize the production of some physical good. Those cities that have become important information hubs, such as New York City, started out as manufacturing centers and more recently transitioned to emphasize other enterprises. Those newer enterprises require a lot less in the way of transportation capacity for physical cargo.

     Consider also: until recently, virtually any joint economic undertaking required those engaged in it to gather in some agreed-upon location. Today, even manufacturing has deemphasized such aggregation of persons. More of just about every physical production task is performed by automated systems – colloquially, robots – than by men. There are exceptions, of course; we don’t yet have robots that build skyscrapers, for example. But the trend is away from the prior requirement for human hands concentrated in a single location.

     So today cities, previously critical to economic advancement, are transitioning away from that role. Some are becoming cultural and entertainment centers. Others are beginning to emphasize the provision of special living arrangements. Others (e.g., capital cities) are sustained solely by politics. And others are gradually fading away.

     The city, like all human institutions, arose under specific social and technological conditions to serve needs and desires that could not be easily met in other ways. Changes in the underlying milieu have altered the incentives and dynamics that propelled the growth of cities. They won’t wither away in the near or intermediate term, but their importance to economic advancement has peaked and is likely to decline for the foreseeable future.

     Which brings us to this article by Mark “Mad Dog” Sherman. Mark’s focus is on the cities’ slow bleed of population to the suburbs and exurbs. Please read it all, including the article it cites. The core of Mark’s piece:

     The real problem cities face is that the politicians believe that the city is so attractive to business that the city can do as it pleases. This is last century thinking. We have yet to see the implementation of the new socio-economic model. It will come, for the same reasons that the industrial model replaced the agricultural model, and the model to come will follow the industrial model. The city cannot structure itself for the present and survive the coming change, just as the agricultural city of 1750 could not have doubled down on its model and survived the change to the industrial revolution.

     Change is certainly afoot. However, the rise of the automobile, cited by the NewGeography article, isn’t as important to the new dynamics as it might seem. Remember that for at least the first twenty-five years after World War II, the preponderance of auto travel was for commutation into and out of the cities where their owners worked. For a while, it appeared to be a stable pattern that could be expected to continue indefinitely.

     Throughout the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries there were powerful incentives to live in cities. But there were also costs to such decisions: reduced living space per person, the endurance of congestion, noise, and mandatorily centralized municipal services, and perhaps most important of all, the acceptance that one has chosen to be part of a target for politicians and other sorts of predators.

     Predators of all sorts gather where the prey is fattest and least well defended. I theorized about this in a fictional setting:

     “Now, we know from historical data that predators of all sorts will concentrate where the prey is fattest. The State, which is merely an organized band of predators with a veneer of legitimacy derived either from tradition or from a manufactured appearance of the consent of its subjects, took a huge fraction of its subjects' annual production from them in taxes. A typical State would increase its exactions on its subjects faster than those subjects could increase their own fortunes. That compelled wage earners to strive ever harder just to run in place, with obvious consequences for production and marketing.”

     In the postwar years, no group of victims-to-be was nearly as fat or as poorly defended as the denizens of a major city. Thus, ambitious politicians, their hangers-on, and other species of scum arrowed directly toward the big cities and battened on them.

     As I wrote that last, I found myself thinking that city dwellers’ awareness of their vulnerability to political predation might have been part of what drove the development of technologies that would support the decentralization of human enterprise. Whatever the case, as the requirements for joint enterprise ceased to emphasize the collection of human workers in central locales, the other disincentives and costs to city life began to loom large. Population growth in the suburbs, exurbs, and countryside was fueled by emigrants from the cities.

     City emigrants are no longer as important to the growth of those alternatives as they once were. Economic opportunities and social supports are plentiful in the more dispersed regions. Additionally, the “information economy” has made it possible for many kinds of work to be done out of the home. In consequence, new adults and newly formed families don’t face the balance of economic and social incentives their progenitors faced in choosing where to live.

     Still, I must disagree with Mark’s assertion that “The city was a mistake.” It was not; it was a transitional socioeconomic institution whose time of glory is now behind us. Jane Jacobs was right in her time and the years that preceded her landmark work. What’s coming will be different. Isn’t it always? And it, too, will have its time in the sun, to be delimited by changes at which one can only guess.

Just Imagine What the Leftists Could Do With This

Read a frightening bit about technology and digital manipulation here. Scroll down further in the post to get to the terrifying bits. Courtesy of Ace of Spades.

Otherwise, I got nothing - I'm starting NaNoWriMo today. I'll be checking in, but WAY too busy for much at all.

Smart Spending on Anti-Terrorism

I've linked an article about some specific measures that could help reduce fatalities, by intelligent use of technology to allow response teams to get more real-time information, and also getting then to the scene quicker.

The real-time sensor/video technology is explained here.

A strong application is in accelerating response time, reducing staging time, and increasing precision of first responders acting in crisis situations such as when bomb threats have been received, when fire is detected, and in active shooting scenarios. Particularly in situations where first responders have limited knowledge of a facility and where the situation is dynamic and changing, does JedEye make an immediate and notable difference, saving life and property.

One of the big problems in active shooter situations is lack of knowledge - of the physical layout and of the location of victims and perps. Police and other responders want to limit further casualties, but delaying response is a major factor in poor outcomes in victims.

ShotSpotter is a technology that's been around for a while - when I taught Forensics, in 2012, I used an article about it in my class. This would be quite useful in cities, where the direction of the gunshots is often uncertain.

This is a more active system, where detection of a gunshot initiates a process, triggering doors to lock and compartmentalize the danger to a single location.

Technological Toxicities

     "I wish the old man had remembered something about the fall of the old Ring society. I had an idea …" And he told the puppeteer his theory of a mutating colonic bacterium.
     "That is possible," said Nessus. "Once they lost the secret of transmutation, they would never recover."
     "Oh? Why not?"
     "Look about you, Louis. What do you see?"
     Louis did. He saw a lightning-storm developing ahead; he saw hills, valleys, a distant city, twin mountain peaks tipped with the dirty translucency of raw Ring flooring…"Land anywhere on the Ringworld, and dig. What do you find?"
     "Dirt," said Louis. "So?"
     "And then?"
     "More dirt. Bedrock. Ring floor material," said Louis. And as he said these words the landscape seemed to alter. Storm clouds, mountains, the city to spinward and the city dwindling behind, the edge of brilliance far away on the infinity-horizon, that might be a sea or a sunflower invasion…now the landscape showed as the shell it was. The difference between an honest planet and this was the difference between a human face and an empty rubber mask.
     "Dig on any world," the puppeteer was saying, "and eventually you will find some kind of metal ore. Here, you will find forty feet of soil, and then the Ring foundation. That material cannot be worked. If it could be pierced, the miner would strike vacuum — a harsh reward for his labor.
     "Give the Ring a civilization capable of building the Ring, and it must necessarily have cheap transmutation. Let them lose the technology of transmutation — no matter how — and what would be left? Surely they would not stockpile raw metals. There are no ores. The metal of the Ring would be all in machines and in tools and in rust. Even interplanetary capability would not help them, for there is nothing to be mined anywhere around this star. Civilization would fall and never rise."
     Softly Louis asked, "When did you figure this out?"
     "Some time ago. It did not seem important to our survival."
     "So you just didn't mention it. Right," said Louis. The hours he'd spent worrying that problem! And it all seemed so vividly obvious now. What a trap, what a terrible trap for thinking beings.

     [Larry Niven, Ringworld]

     Ringworld is an imaginative tour de force, arguably the best “hard” science fiction novel ever written. The passage above concerns the collapse of the civilization that built the Ringworld, a section of a cylinder, made from every scrap of material in its solar system, that rotates around its primary star. The fate of that civilization, which had eliminated the basis for its rise, speaks a phrase of warning to us of human technological civilization, though we’re nowhere near to building a Ringworld of our own.

     It is possible for a civilization to burn its bridges behind it.

     There’s a chance that we’re in the process of doing so:

     When cellphones first appeared, they gave people one more means of communication, which they could accept or reject. But before long, most of us began to feel naked and panicky anytime we left home without one.

     To do without a cellphone — and soon, if not already, a smartphone — means estranging oneself from normal society. We went from “you can have a portable communication device” to “you must have a portable communication device” practically overnight.

     Not that long ago, you could escape the phone by leaving the house. Today most people are expected to be instantly reachable at all times. These devices have gone from servants to masters.

     [Unabomber Theodore] Kaczynski cannot be surprised. “Once a technical innovation has been introduced,” he noted, “people usually become dependent on it, so that they can never again do without it, unless it is replaced by some still more advanced innovation. Not only do people become dependent as individuals on a new item of technology, but, even more, the system as a whole becomes dependent on it. (Imagine what would happen to the system today if computers, for example, were eliminated.)”

     You might not think of this as a problem...yet. But a serious stroke against the technologies we employ ubiquitously today could reveal something truly terrible: not a paucity of resources with which to regain those technologies, but the widespread loss of the abilities for which we’ve substituted them.

     “Use it or lose it” has more than individual application.

---

     Think for a moment about Homo Neanderthalensis. The technology available to him was exceedingly low. He could make a fire. He knew how to use a sharp-edged stone as a knife and an antelope femur as a club. In theory, his entire species could have lost those technologies, throwing him back into tool-less helplessness before the cold and the dark. However, the recovery of those losses would have been rather straightforward. It would probably have occurred within the generation that forgot them, precisely because they’re so low – that is, there’s no sub-technology that enables them.

     Americans of the Twenty-First Century are more vulnerable. There are many technological levels beneath the one we enjoy today. Should one prove vulnerable to some natural occurrence, the United States and the other highly technologized countries would be thrown into the same civilizational pot as the Third World...if not lower. Most of us need our tech tools. Few would be able to do without them.

     This is a common motif in dystopic fiction. John Barnes’s recent Daybreak trilogy exploits it by postulating a terrorist attack that wipes out plastics and semiconductors. With that one blow, Mankind is reduced to the technologies of the early 1800s...and not only are there very few people who know how to use them; they are grotesquely unequal to the support of a population of seven billion.

     Our ability to sustain so many lives, a goodly fraction of them in essentially toil-and-pain-free comfort, lies entirely in our technology.

---

     Perhaps there’s no point in worrying about such things. Perhaps they should be relegated to the darker imaginings of science fiction writers. However, even entertaining the possibility involves confronting an unpleasant fact about Mankind, particularly First World Mankind: There aren’t many of us who are good for much.

     Consider anyone who makes his living by exploiting a technology he lacks the capacity to comprehend. Consider op-ed writers. What fraction of them could contrive a subsistence living for themselves and their dependents without the technology that keeps our supermarkets stocked, even if we were to furnish them with zeroed-in .30-06 rifles and an inexhaustible supply of ammunition?

     Consider entertainers.
     Consider “public” school teachers.
     Consider college academics and administrators.
     Consider the occupation of journalists and newscasters.
     Consider elected officials, policy analysts, aides, and their “gophers.”
     Consider bureaucrats...and do your damnedest not to chortle at the thought.

     Then consider yourself. The odds are fairly good that you make regular use of some medicine to protect your health, perhaps even to keep you alive. As you get older, that probability will rise. For my part, if I were deprived of my hypertension medicines, I’d be dead within the week.

     Technology has elevated Mankind to a dizzying height. Not all of its effects have been completely benign, but without it there would be far fewer of us, all of them living lives that are “nasty, poor, brutish, and short.”

     Now consider our contemporary Luddites: they who rail against technology, who extol the “pastoral life,” and who ardently hope for a cataclysm of the sort John Barnes’s characters and the builders of Larry Niven’s Ringworld suffered.

     Feeling homicidal yet? It didn’t take long, did it?

Threats Impel Decentralization

     The terrorist attack on the Berlin Christmas market has revived, at least for the moment, Europeans’ consciousness of their insecurity – and at least as important, European public officials’ consciousness of the rising tide of resentment their subjects feel toward them. However, if there’s been significant motion among those politicians toward genuinely greater security against the Islamic threat – and let’s not mince words on the feast day of St. Stephen, the first recorded martyr to the Christian faith – I haven’t been able to detect it. To this point, only a few dabs of cosmetic rhetoric have been applied to the scowling face of private European sentiment.

     Frankly, I don’t expect much more than that from Europe’s political elite. The European ruling class is like the American one, except more so:

• Its members arrogate even more power and privilege to themselves;
• They’re even more disdainful of the rights and prerogatives of private Europeans;
• And they’re twice as unlikely ever to admit a mistake, much less to make amends for it.

     So my prediction for the near-term future of Europe is that nothing substantive will change. There’ll be more rhetoric about the problem. There’ll also be an enhanced degree of both self-exculpation and finger pointing to go along with it. But with very few exceptions – Hungary appears to be one – the rulers of Europe’s nation-states will not act to stem the Islamic invasion of their realm, much less to expel those who are already inside the gates.

     The consequences that must follow will involve sharp reductions in Europeans’ willingness to participate in large gatherings. Despite attempts to render them visibly more secure, the Christmas markets have already suffered a decrease in patronage. I would expect other public gatherings – e.g., sporting events, political rallies, and the use of large shopping malls – to be similarly affected.

     For once, Europe will be the trend leader, though in time America will surely follow.

---

     Unless forcibly prevented from doing so, people respond to changes in their environments. The change introduced by Eurocrat foolishness about the Islamic influx evoked the aforementioned reduction in European participation in mass gatherings. That change will evoke further changes: to the ways Europeans work, play, and socialize.

     We may confidently expect that technology will play a part. Of course, in one way it already has: the Internet has changed the ways in which private persons worldwide communicate. We don’t send physical mail nearly as often as we once did. Neither do we spend as much time on the telephone...even though ubiquitous cell phones and cheap voice communication have been around for some time already. But more is surely coming.

     Consider the business meeting. Meetings among persons normally widely separated in space are steadily trending downward in favor of teleconferences that involve no travel. The advantages here are many, and businesses worldwide have been quick to exploit them. But until recently, there’s been little reason to replace meetings by persons who normally work on the same campus (or in the same building) with teleconferences. I predict that the drive toward reducing the frequency and size of concentrations of persons that might attract a terrorist attack will be felt there, quite soon.

     The need to congregate for work of various kinds will be less tractable, though the problems are not insuperable. Repetitive assembly-line jobs are steadily being taken over by robots; some of those that demand a human operator can be performed by a teleoperator manipulating a group of waldoes. Now that fear has been added to persons’ disincentives to commuting, we may expect these developments to accelerate.

     Capital costs and allocations will have their effects. Over the past few decades, people have become ever more expensive while inanimate capital of most sorts has become less so. Companies that contemplate expansion or large-scale renovation will look ever more favorably on approaches that prefer the inanimate to the animate: more machines and fewer (but smarter and more versatile) workers. The political impact will be considerable, but then, much of the increased cost of human workers can be blamed on political interference in the labor market.

     It’s likely that I’ve only scratched the surface here.

---

     The above developments will cut into the supply of terrorist targets over time. However, we cannot expect that terrorists, who have as much interest in perpetuating their influence as anyone, will retire peacefully from the field. They, too, will change their ways.

     A determined terrorist that can’t attack people with bullets or explosives will seek other ways of harming them. He’ll explore biological methods: poisons, gases, and microorganisms. If he can, he’ll attack the food supply of his intended victims. Populations that get their water from centralized sources will remain vulnerable to him. And of course, we all get our air from a common source...at the present.

     Other forms of terrorism will become more significant. The possibility of attacks on our digitally controlled infrastructure has recently loomed large. The more of our underpinnings are held together by a common medium such as the Internet, the more havoc a clever cyberattack could conceivably wreak. Persons who’ve surrendered to the lure of the Internet of Things already have reason to fear this.

     Further decentralizations, or efforts toward them, will arise. Instead of a single Internet with billions of persons and devices on it. I predict that multiple digital mass communication paths will emerge. Some will specialize in financial transactions. Some will specialize in automation and numerical control. Others will support person-to-person communications or meetings. Where gateways from network to network are created, security will be the foremost consideration, as such linkage points would themselves be tempting targets.

---

     There will be peripheral consequences that no one will like. The costs of these developments will be significant; to the extent that they involve governments, they’ll be extortionate. We’ll see each other in person much less often; we’ll take less pleasure from our gatherings, especially those that involve hundreds or thousands. The capital retrenchments I foresee will displace workers, especially those with the lowest and least transferrable skills. And regardless of political developments, we’ll all feel a little less free.

     Not a pleasant outlook for the immediate future, is it? But this is the crop we’ve reaped by permitting the civilization of the First World to be penetrated by that of Islam. It should never have happened; indeed, it should never have been allowed. You cannot treat the gentleman and the savage as equals without ugly consequences.

     Perhaps as the rigors of advancing decentralization begin to chafe us and confine us ever more straitly, we’ll unlearn the folly of multiculturalism on which all the more obviously destructive follies are founded. We can only hope it will not be “a lesson too late for the learning.”

Quickies: On Digital Memory Lane

     The esteemed Charles Hill has a recollection from 1988:

     Seven hundred American dollars for a 40-meg hard drive! Then again, this was quite a deal, considering what was on offer not that long before.

     I can’t help remembering the first computer I ever purchased. It was a Cromemco box – very highly regarded at the time – that had a Z-80 processor, ran CP/M 2.2, had dual 8” floppy disks for storage, and a whopping 64 kilobytes of RAM. Without a terminal or printer, it cost me nearly $4000 – in 1981, that was normal – with about $1100 of the cost being for that 64 Kbyte RAM card.

     I remember marveling over that RAM card. Squeezing that much memory onto a single S-100 bus card struck me as near to miraculous. And it was...then.

     Truly, for those of us who bleed 1s and 0s, these are the good old days.

Quickies: Cautionary Words

From Oregon Muse at AoSHQ:

     Personally, I've always distrusted "the cloud". The point of having your own computer,personal computers they used to be called, is that the computer is your property that you own, therefore you control it. But now, I think, they're boiling the frog: little by little we're ceding final control over our personal information and e-texts to whoever is running the cloud. And if one fine day some Obama-fueled agency pounds on Microsoft's door (or Apple's or Google's) demanding all the files stored on their servers for you, do you think they'd put up even token resistance? I think you can bet that your data would be in the hands of the feds faster than you could say "enthusiastic voluntary compliance".

     Oregon Muse, whoever he is, has the right of it. The entire appeal of “cloud storage” is being able to access files when away from your computer...yet a flash drive or pocket disk drive would be far better for the purpose, without compromising your files or your property rights in them.

     Smart people eschew the “cloud.”

Exponential Curves

     About twelve years ago – yes, I’ve been doing this for that long; since 1997 in fact – I wrote an essay titled “Curves” that appeared at the old Palace of Reason, about the curve of technological advance. Its peroration went like this:

     The test of any political theory is what results it produces in practice. Just-war theory holds that we must wait to be struck before striking back. Now that a modest sum will buy the expertise and components with which to fabricate devices that can kill thousands, even millions, the cost of waiting to be struck has become unacceptable.

     At that time I was mainly concerned about its implications for terrorism and the safety of Americans and our nation. My central point was that the rate of technological advancement is directly proportional to the prevailing level of technology. If we let y represent the level of technology at time t, the equation becomes:

dy/dt = C₁y

     ...where C₁ represents some arbitrary (in this case, unknown) constant. This is one of the first differential equations any calculus student learns to solve:

y = e^C₁t + C₂

     ...where C₂ is an indeterminate constant and e is the familiar exponential base:

e = limit((1 + 1/n)ⁿ)

     ...as n increases toward infinity: approximately 2.71828.

     And now that I’ve exhausted some of you and baffled the rest with (“I was told there would be no...”) mathematics, let’s talk about our situation as regards personal privacy.

---

     It’s well known that the public streets of every significant city in the U.S. are heavily stippled with surveillance cameras. I don’t think we’re yet at the level of Person of Interest, but we’re approaching at an accelerating clip. Indeed, the rate of acceleration is itself increasing. Extrapolating the current trend not too unreasonably, by 2025 every district in the nation with a non-negligible population density will be so heavily equipped with surveillance devices that there will be no public space free of them.

     What follows from that, Gentle Reader? What follows from that plus license plate readers, vehicle recognition systems, government backdoors into credit-card-payment-processing systems and large cellular communications services, and the rest of the we can see you trends of the Twenty-First Century? How much meaning will the concept of privacy have at that point?

     For that matter, would the trend toward total government surveillance necessarily stop there? Might it not extend its feelers into nominally private spaces? After all, if “they” can see and hear you at any and every moment of your life, wouldn’t it cut down on crime, and quite sharply at that? Wouldn’t “they” be likely to argue that it would make offenses like insider trading and domestic abuse things of the past, and that it would therefore constitute a matter of “compelling government interest?”

     Think about it.

---

     He who knows where you are at every moment can exert a great influence upon you through that mechanism alone. He who also knows, to a fairly detailed degree, what you’re doing and with whom can exert still more influence. When the “he” in question is a State without Constitutional bounds, equipped with every imaginable coercive instrument and ruled by men to whom only power matters, we arrive at the genuinely total totalitarianism Orwell imagined but which 1948 technology could not produce.

     Am I dead certain that such a future is headed toward us? No; as I said above, I’m “extrapolating the current trend not too unreasonably.” After all, how long ago did the Supreme Court rule that a government may seize private property and simply turn it over to another private party, as long as it was “for a public purpose?” Your privacy depends entirely on your property rights; once the latter are dissolved, the foundation beneath the former must collapse.

     The irony of the Left’s habitual demands for incursions upon private property should be plain at this point. But no one expects the run-of-the-mill Leftist to grasp it; his “compact and unified church” will shield him against such an intellectual excursion.

---

     As technology advances, monitoring devices will become ever smaller and harder to detect. Yet they’ll be as sensitive as their predecessors, if not more so. The exponential curve of technological advance guarantees this, until we reach some limit imposed by the laws of physics. The consequences strike me as both irrefutable and dire. I cannot take the attitude that Bob Shaw’s protagonists took at the conclusion of his blockbuster novel Other Days, Other Eyes:

     In later decades, men were to come to accept the universal presence of Retardite eyes and they learned to live without subterfuge or shame as they had done in a distant past when it was known that the eyes of God could see everywhere.

     Privacy – space and time in which what we do, and with whom, and to what end, is entirely at our discretion, such that we may choose and act without fear of politically imposed consequences – is one of the main reasons we value freedom. It’s not a right apart from the property rights that make it possible, but it’s a great part of the reason we value those property rights. It is severely reduced today. It might well be gone entirely tomorrow.

     Can you imagine enjoying such a future, Gentle Reader? Enduring it without complaint or regret? If your answer is no, there’s another, much harder question you must confront: once it’s in place, can you imagine successfully rebelling against it? Overthrowing the regime that’s imposed it?

     Food for thought.

Walls Closing In Dept.

Before I launch into today’s tirade, allow me to make a strong recommendation for the website of a friend and colleague: The Declination. The site is run by frequent Liberty’s Torch commenter Dystopic, and is a wealth of good thinking and fine writing. Dystopic’s post of today, a compressed history of the conflict between Islam and Christendom, is an excellent example of his work. Please read it all, and reflect on its significance.

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Now and then I feel what the title of this piece indicates: the sense that I’m being ever more closely monitored by faceless others determined to control my every word and deed. Some of the aspiring controllers are determined to police my language. Others merely want to collect information about me: perhaps to sell it; perhaps to set me up for a fall. I dislike the idea and fight it whenever I suspect it’s in operation. For example, I’ve avoided the acquisition of a cellphone for that reason, as literally all of them report where you are to someone at all times.

A few days ago, Samsung’s “smart TVs” became a new entry on my list of avoidances:

Introducing the full 1080p Samsung Telescreen:

The potential privacy intrusion of voice-activated services is massive. Samsung, which makes a series of Internet connected TVs, has a supplementary privacy policy covering its Smart TVs which includes the following section on voice recognition (emphasis mine):

You can control your SmartTV, and use many of its features, with voice commands. If you enable Voice Recognition, you can interact with your Smart TV using your voice. To provide you the Voice Recognition feature, some voice commands may be transmitted (along with information about your device, including device identifiers) to a third-party service that converts speech to text or to the extent necessary to provide the Voice Recognition features to you. In addition, Samsung may collect and your device may capture voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features. Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.

As an Electronic Frontier Foundation activist pointed out earlier today, via Twitter, the concept of a TV screen that might be snooping on your private conversations — and thus broadcasting a chilling effect by inculcating self-censorship within its viewers — is straight out of George Orwell’s 1984....

If the SmartTV owner does realize how ridiculous this is, Samsung does at least allow them to disable the eavesdropping voice recognition ‘feature’, and instead use a more limited set of predefined ‘voice commands’ — and in that instance says it does not harvest their spoken words.

However it will still gather usage info and any other text-based inputs for data mining purposes, as it also notes further down in the policy. So an entire opt-out of being tracked is not part of this very expensive package.

That’s bad enough, but via the esteemed Charles Hill, we have still more noxious icing on an already distasteful cake:

After Samsung calmed us all down, users of smart TV app Plex noticed a Pepsi commercial playing in the middle of content streamed from their own media server within the house. Plex simplifies using your home computer as a media server for smart TVs, streaming devices, tablets, phones, and game consoles. It is not supposed to inject ads in the middle of the program you’re enjoying. Yet that’s what users report happening: Pepsi ads pop up during shows streamed to their sets using Plex.

A spokesperson for Plex told GigaOm that they weren’t adding ads to users’ video streams. Users reported Pepsi ads interjected in other programs while playing programs directly on the TV from their computer, so the app wasn’t serving up the ads. This was caused by the TV, and only users of Samsung smart TVs have reported it.

Assuming that all the data reported above is accurate, Samsung’s smart TVs are being used to push advertising into the lives of their owners, independently of the source of the material being played.

Would it happen were the source material coming from a DVD? I don’t know. I have no data either way about that possibility. It seems to be a possibility whenever the TV is Internet-connected. For a “smart TV,” overtly intended to facilitate user choice and customization of the viewing experience, this is a most egregious sin.

Am I paranoid? Perhaps. But that’s not the question that concerns me. What I want to know is: Am I paranoid enough?

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Commercial motives are potentially innocent. Nearly all of us seek to sell something to others, whether it’s our products, our services, or our insights. But hyperaggressive “push” marketing is another matter. If you’ve deceived your target into rendering himself defenseless against your importunings, you’ve committed fraud. Innocence is no longer yours to claim.

However one views the commercial aspects of this phenomenon, one must also address the ways in which evil persons with evil agendas can make use of it. For example, it’s not that long ago that we learned about telecom companies’ “pen registers:” the records of what numbers were connected to what other numbers at what times, and for how long. The federal government has employed that data in its anti-terrorism operations. Has it used it for other, less worthy purposes? We cannot know.

We know that major Internet service providers have been frequently pressured by the federal government to yield up information about their subscribers. The rationale is almost always the anti-terror campaign or some other kind of federal-level crime-fighting. Similar pressure has been put on the operators of popular Web-based services, such as Facebook. We cannot know whether that pressure has been consistently met with successful resistance.

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“Come to the Dark Side. We have cookies!” – current Internet meme.

For many persons, a new technique for invading the privacy of others is merely an opportunity to be exploited as it becomes relevant. Those will try to pass it off as purely a commercial gambit, a version of the pre-movie commercials we must endure at the local theater. Others will characterize it as the price we must pay for the expansion of our choices technology has bestowed upon us: unfortunate perhaps, but unavoidable. While there are kernels of truth to both statements, neither is a complete picture of the situation and its hazards.

Technology, be it ever borne in mind, is value-free. It can liberate, but it can also confine and destroy. Nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons make use of the same principles, and many of the same technologies. Governments are relentless about seizing upon new technologies for the advancement of their perennial aim: the control of their subjects.

You’re surely aware of the proposals in several states to mandate tracking devices on privately owned motor vehicles, so their owners can be taxed by the mile traveled. Whether or not you think that to be a fairer method for funding road building and maintenance, think also of the possibilities for the monitoring and control of your movements. For example, think of the way it could be used to prosecute you for using your mobility to escape sales taxes. It’s not that long ago that New York State made a practice of sending tax agents to major furniture outlets in North Carolina, to record the license plates of New Yorkers buying furniture there. Is that still going on? Perhaps not. But with the near-ubiquity of the EZ-Pass, it has ceased to be necessary, as virtually all the states along the Atlantic coastline, plus quite a few others, are linked into that system – and the transceivers aren’t installed solely at toll booths.

Still think keeping that smartphone in your pocket, always powered on, is a good idea?

Space Cases

Rand Simberg’s article of today brings a fresh perspective to those of us who’ve fretted over the seeming decline of America’s space technologies. Please read the whole thing, as the facts it presents are likely to diverge quite a distance from your current preconceptions.

But along with providing a pleasant attitudinal contrast with the common malaise about “America’s retreat from space,” it got me thinking about the challenges of space travel once again, for the first time in several years. Despite the inevitable association with government (ugh), it makes for a pleasant change of subject from politics.

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The first question is always the most important one: What is our purpose in developing technologies for the exploration of space? What actual ends do we seek?

The least disagreeable aim would be to increase our knowledge: of the other bodies in our solar system, and of the laws that govern the universe. Virtually everyone would accept that those are desirable ends, though there would be some dispute over whether space travel is the best way to pursue them. Granted that you can’t prove that the Moon isn’t made of cheese except by going there, still there are other ways to probe the nature of our satellite than by sending men to have a personal look. However, there are aspects of nature that can only be tested in conditions that cannot be maintained on Earth’s surface.

Other purposes elicit much more controversy: to gain a purchase on the strategic “high ground;” to establish off-Earth outposts for experimentation and colonization; to exploit the resources available elsewhere in the Solar System; to safeguard Mankind against extinction; to “build a bridge to the stars;” and so forth. Each of these things is at least one step removed from the bedrock desideratum it’s founded on...and that desideratum could be even more controversial than space exploration itself.

The degree of disagreement over both the ends in view and space exploration as a means toward them guarantees that there will be no end to the political wrangles over whether the federal government should fund or otherwise encourage the development of space technologies, much less operate a space-exploration R&D organ such as NASA. However, what governments can do, private persons and voluntary associations thereof can do – and typically, can do it better. Moreover, they’re doing it, as SpaceX, Orbital Sciences Corporation, and Virgin Galactic are demonstrating even now.

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Once a primary purpose has been selected, other questions, such as the question of the best means, must be addressed. But what about secondary purposes, and how they might be combined with the primary one?

Have a little wisdom from Herbert Spencer:

A blade which is designed both to shave and to carve, will certainly not shave so well as a razor or carve so well as a carving-knife. An academy of painting, which should also be a bank, would in all probability exhibit very bad pictures and discount very bad bills. A gas company, which should also be an infant-school society, would, we apprehend, light the streets ill and teach the children ill. -- Herbert Spencer, "Over-Legislation"

Spencer was, of course, principally concerned with the aggressiveness of government (and its boosters) in taking up an endless series of purposes to the detriment of the ones for which it was founded. But the same observations hold true for any sort of organization: to serve two purposes is to serve neither one as well as we might. The risks inherent in assigning many purposes to a single organization are great – particularly so when one or more of those purposes involves manned travel through space.

It’s always most effective to have a single aim, and to refuse to compromise it for any other end. But that hasn’t been the history of space technologies development. The proliferation of space-oriented companies reduces the probability that any one of them will be tempted to take the whole gamut of space-oriented purposes as its mission...but there’s no guarantee that it will be so, especially once the government gets involved.

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A brief digression onto a related subject of importance: Certain possible objectives for space travel inherently demand exclusivity. For example, if our aim is orbital hegemony, then preventing other powers from acquiring a foothold in low Earth orbit is as important as getting there ourselves. Similarly, if our aim is to annex the Moon to the United States, it’s necessary not merely to get there, but to garrison it against incursions by other powers.

In such cases, politics, especially geopolitics, is the dominant consideration to be served. As long as space technology remains an involvement of the State, such considerations will remain “on the table.” Yet while the State possesses a de facto monopoly, the degree of conflict over such ends will remain low. It would rise as private competition with the State’s space travel organ rises...which suggests that such companies had better be aware of the ugly possibilities involved.

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Finally for this brief screed, past experiences must be mined for the lessons inherent in them. The two Space Shuttle disasters ought to have taught us the folly of using delicate, thermally sensitive solid-fuel rockets to achieve orbital velocity, and of using bodily friction against the Earth’s atmosphere as the preferred way of shedding that velocity for re-entry. The Shuttle development program itself was a case study in technological hubris. (Look into the history of its “success by design” philosophy and the major fires that resulted.) Ponder the compromises that resulted from using the same vehicle both for manned missions and for missions that need no human component, thus serving neither aim with maximum effectiveness. To perpetuate the attitudes and approaches that led to those results would be inexcusable.

I’m a space junkie of long standing. I’m passionate about the importance of the space technologies. I’m an advocate for getting Man firmly established, not merely as a space traveler, but as a space dweller. For those reasons and others, the recent semi-privatization of American efforts in space cheers me greatly: privatization leads to competition, which leads to greater breadth of experimentation and, ultimately, to greater knowledge. But there are clouds on the horizon, in particular, the prospect of a renationalization of space exploration and technology, which grows more likely as Washington becomes more aware of the unpleasant possibilities inherent in unfriendly nations’ advances into space.

All the same, for those of us with one eye on the sky, the best is yet to come.

Better-Off-Without-It Dept.

No. Please! No discussion of Super Bowl XLVIII! My constitution is too delicate for the subject, especially at this hour.

Today's topic was stimulated by my secret love Fausta Wertz. Fausta, a longstanding ornament of the Blogosphere, is one of the ten smartest beautiful tall women on the World Wide Web...yet she didn't manage to avoid this particular wrong turning:

Last year my old cellphone’s charger broke and – since the phone was so old – could not be replaced, no matter where I looked, so I bought a Galaxy S3.

The S3 has more functions than I know how to use or need, and it’s been very reliable. It even gets good signals inside my house, which is a big deal since there aren’t enough cell towers in Princeton.

It’s been a year and now my service provider is sending me emails with tempting “free” phone upgrades, while the Samsung people simultaneously updated the phone.

Please read the entire tale. It's not unique, but it is instructive. Revelatory, even.

Everyone I know has a smartphone.
My wife has a smartphone -- a Galaxy S3, for that matter.
It's never powered down and seldom out of her hand, whether she's texting, checking email, or playing games.
That's the pattern with everyone else I know who has a smartphone, as well.
And they're all equally oblivious to the dangers.

FOOLS! You have leashed yourselves in the most convenient imaginable fashion to the Powers That Be! They know where you are. They know the names of everyone with whom you communicate. They record your conversations and text messages and scan them for keywords with massive arrays of Cray-Blitz computers. As long as the power is on to that devil's device, you cannot escape their clutches!

And what do you do with it? You play games. You send unencrypted text messages. You check TV listings. Oh, you make a phone call now and then, as well, but we've already covered that, haven't we?

But what's the Issue Of The Day? What particular government overreach has commanded the heights of public indignation these past several months? What incursion on individuals' rights currently elicits the greatest degree of outrage?

Privacy.

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I know, I know. The smartphone is a marvel. It encapsulates more power and far more functions than an Eighties-edition mainframe computer. You can read books on it. Take pictures with it. Video, too. It will store and play music, if you like. Web access, of course. You can use it as an organizer, a mobile agenda, a portable compendium of your important documents. It's even got a GPS terminal in it. It's all the promise of the digital revolution in a single handheld device, the next best thing to Gandalf's staff. Star Trek communicators? Feh!

But should it ever get out of arm's reach, you immediately begin to feel a formless dread, an ineffable vulnerability, a nakedness of the soul. Just like that, you're out of touch. Things could be happening that you know nothing about. Important things, like the Obamas' vacation plans, or how many prostitutes were seen leaving Justin Bieber's hotel room last night, or the final score of that...that f-f-fff...no, sorry, I just can't. Forgive me.

For that, you've surrendered the last remaining vestiges of your privacy.

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I own a cell phone. I didn't want one, but my wife insisted. "What if you get into an accident and have to call for help?" she said. "You can't expect to find a phone booth at the corner any more." "Well, in that case," I said, "why would I want a phone? There'd be nowhere to change into my superhero duds, so who'd want to talk to me?" But Beth can be very persistent, and I dislike to make her nervous. So I got one: a basic-basic model whose only function is phone calls. No Web access. No alphameric keyboard. No capacity to store anything but a list of phone numbers most recently called. My "calling plan" costs about $0.25 per month. You should have seen the sneer on the salesman's face...or maybe that was a grimace over not getting the commission he wanted.

I've had it for several years. I've made about fifteen calls on it, total. It contains absolutely no information about me; on every occasion when I've made a call, I've immediately wiped the numbers-recently-called list. And I don't carry it around with me. I leave it powered off, in the center console of my car.

(Yes, I own a car charger.)

This makes me a technological dinosaur by contemporary standards. (The only member of the species who makes his living doing real-time engineering, who owns three different eReaders, whose home network is protected by a hardware firewall, and whose non-trivial communications undergo military-grade encryption, but we'll pass over that in silence.) I'm out of touch. The happenin' world is charging right past me. I'm missing out on developments in politics, cinema, music, sports, foreign affairs, pop culture, and the doings of the beautiful people. There's no way I'd be able to hold my own at a cocktail party. And I can't pass the time playing Jewel Quest when I'm at the car wash.

But I don't have an electronic shackle around my ankle.

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Priorities, people. What are your priorities? Is it really that important to have immediate access to the Perpetual Pile-Up on the Information Superhighway every second of your lives? Is it worth sacrificing your privacy -- and not just to the State, but to your relatives, friends, and coworkers who've internalized as a creed that they can have access to you at all times, and who get ornery and sarcastic should you have the temerity to remain with your book, or prolong your nap, or continue making love to your spouse rather than answer your phone?

Oh, never mind. Forget I said anything. Everyone knows what an old mossback I am. Haven't had a new idea since 1970. Why, my wife has to turn me in the window twice a day so I'll get sun all over.

And go ahead and buy that "smart," Internet-enabled television with built in WiFi. You know, the one with the continuous remote maintenance and automatic upgrades. Just don't bother complaining to me when it starts overruling your choice of programs. Or prompting you about your bedtime, for that matter.